Make Sure Your Content is Well Researched

By Adam | 23 Aug 2015 12:00:00

Content marketing can prove to be an extremely useful marketing strategy. If you're filling up a blog on your website with regular posts about interesting subjects, people will have a big reason to return to you regularly. Furthermore, it gives you a chance to reflect a bit of personality in your business; people will take a shine to you if they think you're nice because of the tone in your blog posts. This will encourage them that your business is worth their money. Plus, if they particularly enjoy reading any of the posts they may well send them to their friends afterwards! It's a good marketing technique and it's beginning to be used more and more as people fully realise its potential.

However, when done badly, content marketing can backfire. Make sure that you are producing content which is high quality. Things like typos and poorly constructed sentences will give people a somewhat bad impression, but the worst thing you can do is write about things without offering a source. If you're writing about a piece of industry news, maybe something particularly exciting, but do not provide a link in the article to show where you got that information from, people may doubt that it is a fact after all. Furthermore, if you report on something which is actually not true (like a story that was falsely reported elsewhere which then made you think it was true) then people will begin to look at your content as unreliable and it is likely to attract criticism.

If people think your blog is unreliable, what else might they think? That's right: that you as a business are unreliable and untrustworthy. If somebody thinks you are untrustworthy they are not going to risk losing money by buying something from you. So, as you can see, poorly researched content marketing does stand to be harmful to your business! Make sure everything you post is well researched and well written.